Tokyo Day 1
First day of our Tokyo adventures, of course started at the train station. Thanks to our handy dandy rail pass Rachel, Kenny and I were set to travel to Tokyo via Shinkansen. Rachel and I made it to the station on time. Her host family is so sweet, it was raining a little bit so they got us a cab from their house to Tokyo station, so a fifteen minute walk turned into a two minute taxi ride. Rachel and I made it to the train on time, but Kenny had a bit of an adventure before getting to the train (but that is his story to tell) and barely made it to the platform on time.
And we made it to Tokyo!!! We couldn't check into our hostel until 3 so we opted to check out Harajuku. But we had luggage. Most train stations have coin lockers where you can store your stuff for as long as you need to. Harajuku, however does not as we found out when we arrived to the station searched around and even asked and attendant. So we went to the next station over, Shibuya and stored our stuff there. It was a bit of a headache trying to find a locker because it is Golden week and everyone and their mom is traveling. We ended up walking around Shibuya for a bit.
Shibuya is famous for having that crazy busy intersection (Rachel kept calling it the scrambled crosswalk, so I guess that's the English name for it?) so we of course had to walk across it. But we are stupid tourists and got honked at because Kenny was trying to film it and we were walking too slow and the lights changed. Well, in our defense, it wasnt just us, but a whole group of people who got honked at.
After Shibuya we went back to Harajuku and wandered the streets. People here dress pretty different from Kyoto. Sluttier, I believe is the word. But it's interesting. I actually got to see legs that weren't covered by leggings. I had almost forgotten what they looked like.
The search for lunch was a pretty epic quest. We wandered all over the place through back streets and empty alleyways. We settled on this cheap tempura place, which honestly had some of the best tempura I have ever eaten. My meal came with tempura, rice, and udon. Yummy.
We didn't eat here, but I thought it was kinda cool it's from Hawaii!! The line to get in was huge.
More wandering and ended up in H&M (yeah, we went to Japan to go shopping in an American (I think I read on a sign that it's actually Swedish or Swiss or some European country that starts with an S, but it's in America so I feel like I can claim it for our country) store) where I found an awesome random shirt for Rachel and awesome neon green shorts for Kenny. Yeah, Rachel and I worked our powers of persuasion and got him to buy it.
By this time we were ready to go. But sadly Rachel and I are girls with no sense of direction and Kenny is a boy with a worse sense of
direction than me. We wandered in circles for a bit but finally got on track to head to the train station. But then we saw the 100 yen store.
Yeah, we made a detour. So much random stuff all for about a dollar. Awesome. I bought a bunch of random useless things and a few useful things and it all came out to less than 1000 yen.
Then off to our hostel where we checked in lay down our stuff and rested for a bit before finding a super cheap restaurant where I ate soba for less than 300 yen. We were kind of determined to go out exploring, but sadly we were too tired to do anything. It was pretty funny, actually. Imagine 3 touristy looking people sitting on the train trying to stay up, we were going to check out Shinjuku at night but just ended up taking the JR Yamanote line in a circle around Tokyo.
Tokyo Day 2
Silly Japan.
Day 2 was a late start, hey, we were tired. Eventually Rachel, Kenny, and I rolled out to Akihabara, the techy district for lunch (brunch?) around 11. We wandered around a bit looking for a place to eat. Akihabara is supposedly known for it's ramen so Rachel and I were pretty set on Ramen and we walked around for a good 20 minutes or so before finding this amazing ramen shop. It was a small
restaurant with a bunch of stools seating business men slurping down a quick lunch situated in front of a counter. The ramen was probably the best I've ever had. It was funny, becuse we had to order tickets from a vending machine, but it was all in kanji and there were no pictures (that's how legit it was, they didn't even cater to silly tourists like us). I like to think of it as a kind of ramen roulette, I picked a number and went with it. I didn't even know what I had ordered until I got it. I mean, I knew I had ramen, I just didn't know what kind. I still don't know what kind, but it was delicious.
Then we walked to this giant electronics store. Like 8 stories dedicated to electronics and geeky things. Rachel and I browsed a bit. Then we moved on the geeky otaku ('otaku' is actually a fancy way of saying 'home' in Japanese. Otaku are called that because they basically stay at home all the time obsessing about anime and videogames. In short they are mega-nerds) section of the store where a large male population was oggling at figurines and anime character statues. Then off to Ghibli museum.
Heard of Miyazaki Hayao? Yeah, Vanessa, the guy who has those weird (you say weird, I say awesome) animated movies. Ghibli is the company he started (according to Rachel I'm too lazy to look this up, so she's basically my shorthand wikipedia) and the museum is dedicated to the movies (mostly his) that the company has produced. It was awesome. Really cool. It took forever to get there, but it
was so worth it. It's hard to even describe and we weren't even allowed to take any pictures.
Let's see it was housed in this large three story building and the displays were mostly of drawings and figurines, but there was this one section on how to animate a film from separate stills, which was pretty cool. There was also a Ghibili short animation, which was quite cute and oh yeah and old fashioned water pump thingy. May I just mention that we were totally not the target audience. There were families with little kids and couples. So when I played with the water pump I had to wait for little kids to stop playing with it, then in my fun I actually made little kids wait for me to finish. I like to think I was teaching them a valuable life lesson of patience.
Then what did we do? Oh yeah, we went to Shibuya to meet Kenny. It was pretty funny, because when we arrived there, Rachel and I were looking for a blonde person, and I saw one standing by our designated meeting spot, then I thought to myself, ''wait, Kenny's not Asian''. Yeah, it was some asian dude with bleached hair. Then we wandered the streets of Shibuya searching for a place to eat dinner. We settled on this real hole in the wall place with the best oyako donburi I have ever eaten. Unfortunately, they did not have enough rice, so although we got the food at a reduced price, we weren't full. After hanging out in the restaurant a bit we headed off to a convenient store to fill up.
We ended our evening in Shibuya by getting a few drinks. Nothing too crazy, but we ended up missing the connecting train to our hostel. It turns out the hostel was a 30 minute walk so we decided to take a taxi, which split among 3 people came out to about 3 dollars a piece, which is twice the cost of our connecting train, but worth the whole not getting lost bit.
Tokyo Day 3
Although not crazy, perhaps we did have a bit too much to drink, because as it turned out Kenny forgot his backpack at the restaurant and we had to backtrack to Shibuya, which meant that we didn't get to go to Hakone, this place with awesome hot springs. I was a little disappointed about the not going to Hakone thing. We didn't do much, we kind of just picked up the backpack, found another ramen shop for lunch and met up with Rachel's friend who took us to see the imperial palace in Tokyo. Oh, and we also had these delicious Taiyaki things. They're in the shape of fish and filled with red beans and were nice and warm when we got them. Scrumdiddlyumptious.
After that business, everyone went their separate ways and Rachel and I started our trip to meet up with her family friends. What started out as a 50 minute trip turned into a 2 hour extravaganza. Lots of standing. But in the end it was all worth it, because when we finally met up with her family we went to eat at this sushi restaurant. So good, and because her family friends are so nice, it was free (for me). Hooray! They actually live on an American military base near Yokohama, so we drove around the base a bit and stopped by the bowling alley to see what was up. Then back to their home and fruit. Man, they gave us some fruit here and it was so good. Easily the most delicious melon I have ever had, and the apples, the apples are ridiculous.
Tokyo Day 4
The following day we were supposed kick it off by visiting Ino Shima, but due to a bit of sleeping in on our part, it was too late to make the two hour round trip to the island and still have time to meet up with Rachel's friends in Shinjuku. Instead we went to a park. An awesome cool park with a tower and a field and crazy European-esque fountains. Quality stuff. Then off to Shinjuku where more wandering ensued and ended with donuts or in my case a delicious delicate strawberry cream puff. Mmmmmm. Sweets.
Rachel and I got a little too caught up in Shinjuku and we ended up missing our scheduled train (a common theme in our Golden Week trip), but thanks to the awesome JR passes, we had nothing to worry about and just took the next train. Sadly, for me, this meant that I missed the last rapid train to my homestay. An extra hour long train ride tagged on top of the bullet train made Anya a dull girl. And when I fell asleep, I hit the bed hard.
1 comment:
Hey... in his film the kids parents turned into pigs... that's WIERD!!!
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